Happy Halloween, adventurers! Yes, I know we still have 29 days left, but if Twitter is any indication then this entire month may as well be Halloween. A new month means new stuff will be coming to Adventure Rules, so let’s take a few moments to look back and then see what’s on the way for the blog.
In September we wrapped up the two-month endeavor known as the Blogger Blitz. This was a massive undertaking possible only thanks to the hard work of many bloggers in the community. Those folks are credited on the Amazing Adventurers page, and the entirety of the Blogger Blitz event can be found by clicking on the phrase “Blogger Blitz” in the sidebar to your right. A two-month community event is no small feat, and I say that not to brag about how “awesome” I am but rather to acknowledge how exhausted I am! Writing the results posts typically took 4-6 hours of my Thursday nights, I often woke up early to make sure I had time to reblog posts for the event and to do promotional stuff – I didn’t go all Polygon or anything but I definitely wore myself out and will not be doing a community event again for at least a couple of months.

That being said, I still have every intention of participating in other blogs’ community events. I’ve been appearing in Later Levels’s “Question of the Month” for a couple of months now and I intend to continue that. And while I missed The Well-Red Mage’s last big question because I was focusing on the Blogger Blitz, if a third one comes up soon I fully intend to answer it. I’m also on the eventual guest list for the Musical Mayhem event on Overthinker Y, so while I won’t be hosting anything for awhile, I still have every intention of appearing on some other blogs in the coming month. So look forward to that (mostly because those other bloggers are all super awesome)!
This past month I finished a little game called Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle, and I enjoyed it enough and felt I was decent enough at it that I decided to do character guides for the game. I am currently halfway done with that endeavor having already done guides for Mario, Rabbid Peach, Rabbid Luigi, and Luigi. My intent is to finish those up within the next couple of weeks, as I want them to all be published relatively close together (I will NOT pull the same stuff I did with Fire Emblem Fates). If you don’t like guides or aren’t interested in reading guides for this particular game, worry not – this series will end soon and then it’ll be back to opinion pieces and news reports for awhile.

While I anticipate October will be a semi-tame month here on the blog, I do have a little something fun planned: InkTober. If you followed Adventure Rules this time a year ago, you might know that I attempted to participate in the InkTober event. What is InkTober, you might ask? It’s an event where you draw something in ink every day for the 31 days of October. You can draw originals or fanart, you can come up with your own ideas or use the daily prompts, and there’s basically no limits other than the fact that you’re supposed to draw in ink. My InkTober efforts were pretty short-lived last year but this time I want to do the whole month.

Here’s the stuff I did get done last year.

Now the reason I’m explaining all of this is because when I do InkTober, I do a little something else to help my drawings relate a little more closely to the theme of the blog. Each weird critter I draw is actually a monster design for the tabletop RPG Dungeon World, and with the picture of the creature I also include stat blocks explaining what the monsters is capable of. If you play Dungeon World, you are welcome to use these creatures in your own game – and this time around, I’m including a setting too! Rather than just designing random monsters that don’t necessarily go together, each of these creatures will all fit together in one big concept that you can then use for a whole campaign setting. If that sounds cool to you, you definitely want to follow Adventure Rules on Twitter to check out all of the monsters as they go live. As far as the setting itself, here’s a description:

In the land of Issr-Alra, there is a great university of sorcery known as Mujukul. There, almaji (or “magicians” in the common tongue) from the world over come to study the mystic arts. In a particular class, the students’ final project is to create a bur-almaji, a protected tower where the magician’s artifacts and research are kept safe. The prevailing theory is that any good bur-almaji needs only five rooms – students must abide by these rules when completing their project. For the sake of realism, the bur-almaji must be filled with genuine research and treasures to plunder, as well as genuine traps and monsters to overcome.

Once the projects have all been graded, the students and their professor dump all of the bur-almaji in a remote part of Issr-Alra where the experiments within can do no harm to anyone. Over the course of many years, these magical buildings heaped on top of one another have become a bur-almaji of their own. From time to time, wanderers stumble upon this place and dare to venture inside. Those who survive and manage to come away with valuable magical artifacts tell their friends and business partners of Almaji Maqbur, the “magician’s graveyard.”

As word spread about Almaji Maqbur, adventurers from all over Issr-Alra began to seek it out and explore its depths. These adventurers became known as khatimaq – “graverunners” — and formed a community just outside of Almaji Maqbur. Merchants, blacksmiths, alchemists, and all manner of folk brought business to this place that became known as Abet Khatimaq, and the khatimaq became not rivals but allies. After all, every semester new treasures and secrets are added to Almaji Maqbur, so there is always enough gold to go around for those brave enough and strong enough to claim it.

This setting was created using advice from the Dungeon World companion “The Perilous Wilds,” and, as instructed in the book, I now owe a MASSIVE apology to anyone who speaks Arabic, my language of inspiration. Sorry!

The tower of Almaji Maqbur is a setting I created for my own players that I thought was interesting enough that some other folks would want to try it out, so feel free to tell your own stories and to design a tower that is uniquely yours! Throughout the month of October my InkTober drawings will be giving you monsters to populate this setting with, so be sure to stick around for more ideas to incorporate into the game.

As far as my other October plans? Well, as far as gaming I am currently working through Professor Layton and the Curious Village, so you might see some posts from me talking about my newfound love for these fun puzzle games. I also might finally get to finish inFamous: Second Son and (this one is likely a stretch) maybe even play through Dishonored 2. As far as tabletops, lately I’ve been looking into a one-shot horror game called Ten Candles that I plan to play with my typical group and then review for Halloween – which falls on Tabletop Tuesday! So that should be a lot of fun.

I hope you all are looking forward to this month on Adventure Rules! If you’ve got some cool plans for Halloween or October in general, I’d love to hear them in the comments below. Particularly if you are a fellow blogger, I want to know what posts I should be looking forward to. 😉 If you also are doing InkTober you should hit me up on Twitter – I’m stoked to see the cool art from the event this year and will definitely be looking for some pieces to retweet. Thanks for reading, adventurers!

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Published by Robert Ian Shepard

Robert Ian Shepard is a husband, father, and aspiring writer. If you need a good laugh, check out his blog Adventure Rules, the Essential Companion of Heroic Adventurers!
View all posts by Robert Ian Shepard